Streetsblog San Francisco

Despite a stated Transit First policy, the Transbay Joint Powers Authority (TJPA) and the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) are encouraging solo drivers to bring their cars into San Francisco's downtown and park all day at low prices, according to a parking union who has been picketing in front of a temporary 250-space parking lot at 80 Natoma/81 Minna Street, the site of the future Transbay Transit Center.

Teamsters Local 665, which represents city parking workers and some private sector parking workers, has been picketing this week in front of a parking lot administered by ABC Parking, a non-union company, demanding that TJPA and Caltrans shut the parking lots down and use the property for open space.

"If you are going to drive into San Francisco, it’s the premium way to get into town and [it should] not be subsidized by Caltrans," said Local 665 President Mark Gleason, who asserted that Caltrans and TJPA lots were half the price of nearby municipal parking facilities. Gleason argued the MTA, which runs Muni, could be getting a lot more money from parking if those facilities were not in business and drivers had to park in municipal lots. Even if they chose to park in private facilities, said Gleason, they would pay more money and the city could collect more parking tax revenue.

"The service they are providing should dovetail with the Transit First Policy and should not be adversarial to it," said Gleason. The union estimates there are at least 7,000 parking spaces in more than 15 Caltrans easements that could be closed.

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The San Francisco Planning Department will release the Draft Plan for the new Transbay Terminal and development project after the Planning Commission meeting tonight at 5:30 p.m. According to Planning's Joshua Switzky, the plan will be presented to the commission but there will not be extensive discussion about its details until future public hearings.

In a press release sent out moments ago, Mayor Gavin Newsom called the project a lynchpin of the city's future growth, "one that is based in sustainability and channeling growth around major investments in public  transit.” 

“This plan takes a very comprehensive approach to sustainability, looking at everything from land use to transportation patterns to energy systems in order to reduce the ecological footprint of growth,” Newsom said in the release.

John Rahaim, the Planning Director, said San Francisco's downtown has added "over 20 million square feet of office space, hotels and thousands of housing units since the 1985 Downtown Plan. This growth was possible due to excellent transit, resulting in little appreciable increase in auto congestion on downtown streets."

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Let's hope California rail passengers can look back on the drama playing out between the Transbay Joint Powers Authority (TJPA) and the California High Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) as a small hiccup on the way to building the nation's preeminent rail network into one of the most impressive rail stations in the world. And for our sake, let's hope Washington isn't paying too much attention to the infighting and will still award California the lion's share of the $8 billion in federal stimulus money slated for high speed rail.

What's clear is the battle between the TJPA and CHRSA is as much about the personalities running the authorities and their obvious distrust and dislike for each other as it is about the engineering numbers.  The impasse became public in January, at an MTC commission meeting, when the CHRSA projected it would need capacity at the Transbay Terminal for twelve trains per hour, up from four trains per hour that had been cleared in environmental review. 

Supervisor Chris Daly, an MTC Commissioner and TJPA Board Member, called the announcement a "complete and total blindside" and "single A baseball."

According to TJPA spokesperson Adam Alberti, they heard about the new numbers in a private meeting only a few days prior.  CHRSA Executive Director Mehdi Morshed said they were presented in their business plan as early as November, 2008 (PDF).  Alberti said a business plan is not an operational plan, and didn't provide a rationale to substantiate the need to run so many trains.  Morshed said they had delivered their draft operational plan to TJPA, MTC, and Caltrain several weeks ago.  Alberti called the CHRSA document a fiscal plan that has very little in operational data, not sufficient to justify engineering a second level to the train box.

See where this is going?

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